STORY POSTED!

POSTED MY SHORT STORY yesterday but couldn’t update journal about it because livejournal was down.
Got interesting mixed responses to my story yesterday in class. I’ll have to post about those later, after I get more responses from you guys.

There are lots of eggs at home. I’ve been out of eggs for two weeks so this makes me happy all out of proportion with how much of my life this affects.

Finished one-third of my historiography class’s reading for this week while on the plane. Hooray for being productive.

Had a freaky dream last night:
Shra, Jackie, and Erik all ditched me to hang out together, while I waited for them upstairs in a creepy house full of people (including babies that had ears like cats, though in the dream that was cute). All while I waited I was tormented by this girl who I didn’t like anyway but who I felt sorry for because she’d been publicly rejected by two lovers and thus didn’t have anywhere to sleep that night. When I got downstairs finally to look for my three I was really hurt and upset to find them doing fine without me, so I told Erik off for it. He told me that rejected girl had told him I had already gone to sleep, so he came back down without looking for me. I started telling him angrily that all this time they were so cozy together downstairs I had been up there in my room, which rejected girl had made into a scary place because she kept telling me that there were countless unmentionable evil things hidden in the shower. At that moment I realized how ridiculous this was: I was blaming the girl for preventing my friends from coming to me, even while I explained that her stories had made me fearful of my own room. Then I woke up.
Kind of disturbing. Okay, very disturbing, except that lately I’ve been feeling great about my relationships and things. So this dream came completely out of left field, as far as I can tell, and thus doesn’t bother me as much as it would have were I feeling insecure.

Oh yes–the story is posted, I said. Go to my art page [now defunct, but see below] and click on the link near the bottom that reads “Random sketches and scribblings.”

[This post was imported on 4/10/14 from my old blog at satsumabug.livejournal.com. I’ve pasted an excerpt of the story, below.]

Thali clutched her keys in her left hand as she climbed the stairs back up to her apartment following her afternoon at Café Belize. The front door of another apartment opened onto the stair landing, and as she passed through she heard someone begin to open that door. Not wanting to meet anyone at the moment, she skipped up the remaining stairs as quickly as she could and let herself in to her apartment before her neighbor emerged. She closed the door quietly behind her and lowered her shoulder slightly, releasing her bag from her body. The bag came to the floor and so did Thali, crossing one foot over the other and lowering herself to a seated position, without touching the floor with her hands. A small bump and she sat, starting to take off her shoes.

As a dancer, Thali had found communion with the solid coolness of a hardwood floor. She had gone to pains to seek out an apartment with floors like those in dance studios, smooth, not too dark in color, with a slightly worn finish that was pleasant to the touch of bare feet. In her search she had refused even a new Berber carpet, though its nubbles would have been a comfort to sore soles after long days of dancing. No, it was that particular hardwood she needed. It rooted her body, was more comfortable to her than the best carpet. Every time she returned to her apartment from an excursion into the non-dance or non-yoga world, Thali had a ritual. She put down her things right at the door, removed her shoes, and lay down on the open space on her floor between the door and her bed. She pulled her back into the solid wood and extended her limbs out long, bending and stretching and rolling as her body needed. Against a good wood floor Thali’s body met not resistance but almost a cradling comfort; she and the floor understood each other. It knew her curves and angles, the shape of her body, and she knew how to sit, lie, or move across it in such a way that its solidness became her support and lift.

Most people who do not dance cannot understand the comfort of a good floor. To Thali it was strength. Into the floor went the roots of her body-being, and up from the floor her muscles grew, flowing into movement. Some days Thali came back from the outside and her body just knew what to do. Those times she could spend hours in the open space there by the bed, lost in the pureness of movement, the strong unity of a body that understood itself as a whole. This was the beauty of her training, that it had taught her to execute any gesture as the work of one perfect instrument and not a series of parts roughly connected by a brain.

Thali was a good dancer, a beautiful dancer, but she had chosen not to pursue a professional career. Unlike most of the other girls in her dance classes, Thali had come late to dance, so it did not define her as it did them. They had been dancing since age four; their very identity had grown up around the barre and backstage in countless dressing rooms. They felt the call to perform. Thali danced only for herself and the joy it brought her. But despite her indifference to the stage, she was a captivating performer. What other girls strove to convey, Thali understood naturally. It was an odd paradox. Thali in normal life withdrew into herself and became a secret, but Thali dancing did not do so. From the moment she stepped into a place as a dancer, from that first instant of fluid movement, Thali’s soul emerged, emanating through her body like the glow of sunshine, shimmering, exposed for once for all to see. Her classmates watched her with envy during class as she did her thing, radiating pure self, but oblivious to their gaze. And when she was finished and her regular clothes back on, that radiance withdrew back into her once more, and it was just another young woman who left the studio, bag slung over the shoulder, walking one step at a time down the stairs and back out onto the busy street.

Thank you. ^__^ I’m glad you liked the story. It IS a very positive story, and while it’s not exactly how I feel about things, there’s a lot of me and my feelings and thoughts and issues in there. Working on the story and trying to figure out the character has really helped me out with things in my own life. It’s been incredible, actually.